Henry David Thoreau
(1817-1862), was the nineteenth-century inheritor of Gilbert
White's arcadian legacy. Thoreau was both an active field ecologist
and a philosopher of nature whose ideas anticipated much in the
mood of our own time. In his life and work we find a key expression
of the Romantic stance toward the earth, as well as an increasingly
complex and sophisticated ecological philosophy. We find in
Thoreau, too, a remarkable source of inspiration and guidance for
the subversive activism the recent ecology movement. Thoreau
set ecology of wildness against the values and institutions of
expansionary capitalism and tried to shift the balance away from
the bias against nature in western religion.
The most notable
thing about his writings is that they virtually ignore our current
concerns with the preservation of habitats and species. When he
says "all good things are wild and free", he no doubt includes
these things. But Thoreau mainly talks about human beings,
their literature, their myths, their history, and their work and
leisure as part and parcel of planet Earth, its cycles, sucessions
and dependencies.
